The New York Times Book Review - Laura van den Berg
…Pearlman's majestic, fleet-footed new collection, is…cause for celebration. The stories in Honeydew excel at capturing the complex and surprising turns in seemingly ordinary lives…In these stories, the point of view flits nimbly from character to character, allowing the reader to absorb the world from a bird's-eye perspective. The result is like a diorama, simultaneously intimate and removed: We are able to observe both how these characters perceive the world and how the world perceives them…If Binocular Vision launched Pearlman, rightly, into the spotlight, Honeydew should cement her reputation as one of the most essential short story visionaries of our time.
From the Publisher
"Honeydew should cement [Pearlman's] reputation as one of the most essential short story visionaries of our time."—The New York Times Book Review
"There remain a few dedicated practitioners of the short story, and Edith Pearlman is one to be cherished... The 20 stories [in Honeydew] are vinegary, rueful, droll, humane and endlessly inquisitive. Though intricately constructed, they are slight in drama and emphasis, set down like a light footprint that nevertheless fixes itself in one's memory as though pressed in wet cement."—The Wall Street Journal
"Pearlman is our greatest living American short story writer, and Honeydew is her best collection yet."—The Boston Globe
"Pearlman's short fiction is interesting for the ways in which it combines proximity and distance... Pearlman can also move back from characters, in order to see the entire span of their lives. Then she becomes one of God's spies, condensing a life into a few sentences, taking on the power of prophecy... Pearlman's fiction brings together, with uncanny wisdom, short views and long views: the hours of lives and the length of our lives. She is tender and distant at once."—James Wood, The New Yorker
"Even though [Pearlman's] characters have feet of clay like the rest of us, they often seem to float above the ordinary world like the figures in a Chagall painting... What a pleasure to encounter a writer who can speak volumes in a few short sentences."—The Seattle Times
"Reading a Pearlman story is like entering the jet stream of some stranger's life. You feel the rush and fear and excitement, and then you exit, overcome but satisfied. Her nuanced stories, each one a small gem, explore complicated relationships and strange conundrums found in everyday life."—San Fransisco Chronicle
"If you have never read Edith Pearlman, you're in for a lovely surprise, and if you have, you're in for another treat... Honeydew is ripe with often bittersweet, unconventional love stories that somehow manage to encompass loss and pain yet reaffirm the value of living... Like Alice Munro, Pearlman deftly encapsulates whole lifetimes in compact stories by focusing on pivotal moments that reverberate over decades."—The Washington Post
"Exquisite work... Such narrative judgment and authority are a pleasure to be in the presence of... This newest book contains 20 stories in fewer than 300 pages, and even the shortest among them convey a depth and a texture well out of proportion to what their word counts might suggest them capable of."—The Chicago Tribune
"Like Alice Munro, Pearlman confronts the earthier aspects of life without a steady authorial gaze... Pearlman conveys heft and profundity in few words and with the lightest of touches; her climactic revelations are nver thudding or melodramatic, nor do her conclusions trail off disappointingly... Her stories are beautifully crafted and formally coherent... The stories in Honeydew are original, unsentimental and profoundly bizarre... unforgettable."—Commentary
"The short story master... At her best, Pearlman invigorates our curiosity about others, encouraging us to flip page after page just to see what a character ate for lunch... Pearlman's stories encourage us to sink deeply into them, and we become contented ghosts snooping on these unadorned, authentic lives... The Bottom Line: Pearlman may not be innovating the short-story form, but she's executing it perfectly."—Time Out New York
"Prepare to be dazzled. Edith Pearlman's latest, elating work confirms her place as one of the great modern short-story writers... Vivacity and zest enliven every page. Body language is wittily caught... Personalities are keenly explored. Honeydew elatingly continues the celebration of life's diversity to which Binocular Vision so excitingly introduced us."—Sunday Times (UK)
"Honeydew will afford an international audience another opportunity to enjoy Pearlman's distinctive and memorable fictions... Pearlman's stories—slightly old-fashioned in their use of conceit; refreshingly loose in their capacity for digression or tangent; occasionally Whartonian in the bemused and acidic clarity of their narrative eye—are sui generis...[these stories] share a particular perspective that, like a perfume, floats throughout... to make of life's everyday leavings a life-saving nectar—is perhaps, Pearlman's most consistent endeavor. She is wise, yes, but also unfailingly generous, even joyous... it certainly makes her fiction a fortifying pleasure to read."—Claire Messud, Financial Times
"These elegant, compassionate stories bring 'regular' people to complex life. Pearlman's flawed characters demand your attention and win your heart."—People Magazine
"HONEYDEW is a collection of work so vivid, so true, and so vital that the reader herself comes away all the more real. How can a story do what Pearlman's stories do? She is an incomparable master."—Kelly Link, author of Magic for Beginners and Stranger Things Happen
"Edith Pearlman's work, so wise and witty, pierces right to the heart. Like Grace Paley and Penelope Fitzgerald, she can capture characters and their whole world in a few perfect lines: how does she do that? Her brilliant economy is matched only by her depth of feeling."—Andrea Barrett, author of Servants of the Map and Ship Fever
"Edith Pearlman is a contemporary master of the short story, with an utterly distinctive voice-tartly observant, unfailingly compassionate, slyly amused. HONEYDEW is a stellar collection, a wide-ranging examination of Pearlman's favorite subjects-the mysteries of love and friendship, the indignities and compensations of growing older, and the knotty complexities of the human heart."—Tom Perrotta, New York Times bestselling author of Election, Little Children, and The Leftovers
"To read an Edith Pearlman story is to sense a mysterious voice singing just under the surface of the prose; it is to be so beguiled by elegance and wit that the inexorable surging power of the story astonishes when it finally hits the reader. Honeydew is brilliant. Edith Pearlman is among the greatest of the greats."—Lauren Groff, New York Times bestselling author of Arcadia and The Monsters of Templeton
Pearlman returns with another collection of closely observed, often devastating stories . . . [She] writes with the wisdom of accumulated experience . . . Pearlman fills volumes with her economy of language . . . [and] serves up exemplary tales, lively and lovely."—Kirkus (Starred Review)
"This affecting collection periscopes into small lives, expanding them with stunning subtlety... Magical and sensual."
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
"A generous collection of depth and sensitivity featuring a range of unusual characters."—O Magazine
"Edith Pearlman's short stories have often been compared with John Updike's, and the comparison is apt...All of the powerful emotions are depicted in rich, controlled prose, one of the earmarks of a Pearlman story. Whether it be for carefully dissecting her characters' feelings or observing tiny details, Pearlman reveals her acute eye time and time again... In the tradition of Joyce, Chekhov, Updike and Munro, Pearlman's surprising, memorable stories are joys to behold."—Shelf Awareness
"Pearlman repeatedly thrills us by opening up secret worlds, and it's because of the exquisite care with which these worlds are formed that we come to care deeps about her her people ("characters" just doesn't cut it)... Her stories hold a reverence for the magical, the anomalous, and the chance encounters all around us... Something about this book feels so urgent, so wise, and it had me turning pages until the wee hours."—The Millions
Sunday Times (London)
Prepare to be dazzled…Vivacity and zest enliven every page. Body language is wittily caught…Personalities are keenly explored.”
The Oprah Magazine O
A generous collection of depth and sensitivity featuring a range of unusual characters.”
New York Times bestselling author of The Leftovers Tom Perrotta
A stellar collection…the mysteries of love and friendship, the indignities and compensations of growing older, and the knotty complexities of the human heart.”
New York Times Book Review
The stories in Honeydew excel at capturing the complex and surprising turns in seemingly ordinary lives.”
Booklist (starred review)
Pearlman not only writes with bewitching clarity, she also fathoms much about our inner lives and relationships that is unexpectedly wondrous.”
Shelf Awareness
In the tradition of Joyce, Chekhov, Updike, and Munro, Pearlman’s surprising, memorable stories are joys to behold.”
author of Memory Wall Anthony Doerr
So many lives seethe inside this book! It's a city, a country, a world, rendered in devastating detail and delivered from one woman's sparkling and rare imagination. If you read, write, or teach short fiction — if you believe gorgeous, scrupulously made literature nourishes the soul — then you must read Edith Pearlman.
author of A Better Angel Chris Adrian
Edith Pearlman's curiosity and highly empathetic intelligence squire the reader through a marvelous variety of physical and psychological landscapes. But the collection also reveals the lovely common denominator of her fiction, a buoyant grace, which she gently exhorts us to recognize in everyday life.
New York Times Book Review Roxana Robinson
These quiet, elegant stories add something significant to the literary landscape.
author of Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn Alice Mattison
Edith Pearlman is a master of the short story . . . and we're lucky to have Binocular Vision, this generous book of new and selected stories. Pearlman's characters . . . are complicated, fully alive. You can't stop reading, because you know they'll astonish you on the very next page.
Ann Patchett
I think that Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories should be the book with which Edith Pearlman casts off her secret-handshake status and takes up her rightful position as a national treasure. Put her stories beside those of John Updike and Alice Munro. That's where they belong.
Los Angeles Times David Ulin
Pearlman peels back the surface of the conventional and reveals the more complicated emotions underneath... All of the pieces here have been exquisitely arranged to make this book. Themes recur; narratives speak to one another—the effect is not so much of a sampling as of a suite. Of all the remarkable things about Binocular Vision, this may be the most compelling, that it enacts a worldview in thirty-four precise and subtle movements, reminding us that if connection is elusive, there is nobility in perserverance, and that we are almost always greater than the sum of our parts.
Yiyun Li
In a world where volume is often prized over what's actually been said, it is a great comfort to know there are writers like Edith Pearlman, who works outside the noise and writes alongside Chekhov and Frank O'Connor and other master storytellers.
Wall Street Journal
The twenty stories are vinegary, rueful, droll, humane, and endlessly inquisitive.”
New York Times bestselling author of The Monsters Lauren Groff
Honeydew is brilliant. Edith Pearlman is among the greatest of the greats.”
AudioFile
[Honeydew is] especially effective on audio, thanks to Suzanne Toren’s artistry…She creates credible, complicated characters…and Toren’s performance puts a unique stamp on each remarkable piece. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award.”
author of The Women T.C. Boyle
Edith Pearlman is an absolute master of the form: these are stories that abjure tricks and flash for brilliantly drawn characters, classic construction, and language that sings and aches all at once.
FEBRUARY 2015 - AudioFile
Edith Pearlman, the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award winner for BINOCULAR VISION, offers another collection of painfully succinct observations of the ordinary events and people who find themselves under her microscope. Pearlman’s economy of language creates imagistic prose that feels like poetry. It’s especially effective on audio, thanks to Suzanne Toren’s artistry. Toren pulls listeners into the unusual lives of a pedicurist who is an excellent listener, a big-hearted antique dealer, Louie-the-vegetable-man—who is “not composed of fruit or vegetables”—and a family with an anthropomorphic plant. She creates credible, complicated characters—from Somali refugees in Boston to a stowaway on a cruise ship. The cast is large and memorable, the stories piercing and perceptive, and Toren’s performance puts a unique stamp on each remarkable piece. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2014-10-22
Pearlman (Binocular Vision, 2011, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award) returns with another collection of closely observed, often devastating stories of more or less ordinary life.Pearlman is a poet of eyes and hair; nearly every story features an observation, often in the form of an arresting image, of these features. So it is that in the opening story, in which an art historian figures, a woman appears whose "eyes in her lightly wrinkled face were the blue of a Veronese sky," and so it is, in seeming homage to Chekhov, that in another story, a character sports "brown hair, too much of it, a blunt nose and chin, and a habit, during conversation, of fastening his gaze on one side of your neck or the other." A vampire? No, just another character who's not quite comfortable inside his or her own skin, as so many of Pearlman's characters are not. Pearlman, who is in her late 70s, writes with the wisdom of accumulated experience, and many of her characters have suffered the loss of spouses, even if they themselves are not yet of age. One comparative youngster, a spry 49, has just lost her husband in war: "Each of his parts was severed from the others," Pearlman writes arrestingly, "and his whole—his former whole—was severed from Paige." Every word counts in that sentence, and Pearlman fills volumes with her economy of language, even if so much is devoted to such not-quite-usual matters as "corneal inlays" and people who bear odd sobriquets: "Louie the vegetable man was not composed of fruit or vegetables. He was composed of a cap, a face with little eyes and a big nose and a mouth missing some teeth, and a pile of assorted clothing from a junk shop." Without quite the moral gravity of Alice Munro but with all the skill: Pearlman serves up exemplary tales, lively and lovely.
